Asanokan Storehouse

Thirty-Seven Square Metres in the Courtyard

The Asanokan Storehouse (麻野館土蔵, also written Asanokan Dozō) is a two-storey earthen-walled storehouse at Chaya in the Futamicho district of Ise City, Mie Prefecture, built in 1921 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 7 October 2014 under registration number 24-0179. It occupies the western part of the courtyard that separates the Entrance Wing from the Banquet Wing on the grounds of an inn that still operates.

At 37 square metres of building area it is by some distance the smallest of the three registered structures here. The Entrance Wing covers 437 square metres and the Banquet Wing 312. This is a service building: a place for bedding, tableware, lacquer, seasonal decorations, the accumulated equipment that a large inn needs and cannot leave lying about.

The construction type is dozō, in which a timber frame is packed with thick layers of earth and then finished in lime plaster. The result is heavy, slow to burn and stable in humidity, which mattered enormously in a wooden lodging district where a single fire could take the whole street. Storehouses of this kind were where a household kept anything it could not afford to lose.

Its date sets it apart from its neighbours. Both the Entrance Wing and the Banquet Wing were raised in 1895; the storehouse belongs to 1921, a full generation later, in the Taishō era. It was built as the inn was growing, not when it was founded.

Where the Care Went

The roof is a simple gabled form covered in pantiles. The walls are the interesting part. They are finished in black lime plaster, kuro-shikkui, a labour-intensive treatment in which lampblack is worked into the lime and the surface is burnished to a dark sheen. Below the plastered band that runs around the upper wall, the exterior is protected with weatherboarding held in place by notched vertical battens, a technique called sasarako shitami. The boarding takes the punishment of wind-driven salt spray; the plaster above stays clean and dark.

Then there is the window hood on the courtyard side, and this is where the building stops being merely functional. The small tiled canopy over that window uses purpose-made shaped tiles along the raking verge, including a bargeboard element executed in tile rather than timber. At each end of the stacked flat courses that cap the hood sit ornaments carved with a wave motif.

Consider where that detail is. Not on the street elevation, where passers-by would see it. On the courtyard side, facing inward, visible mainly to the household and to guests crossing between the two main wings. Someone paid for wave-pattern tilework on a storeroom window, at an inn a hundred metres from the sea, in a place almost nobody would look. That decision is the whole argument for this building's registration.

The criterion applied was contribution to the historic character of the national landscape. All three Asanokan buildings were registered together on the same day, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs description of the group emphasises how the ensemble records the changing shape of Japanese tourism across the Meiji, Taishō and Shōwa eras. The storehouse is the Taishō term in that sequence.

A note on status: registration is a distinct and lighter category than designation. The Hinjitsukan, a short walk along the same shore, was built in 1887 as a rest house for imperial and other distinguished visitors and holds the rank of Important Cultural Property. The Asanokan buildings are registered, a system introduced in 1996 that recognises value while allowing owners to keep using and adapting their buildings.

Visiting, and What to Do Instead

Direct viewing is difficult, and there is no point pretending otherwise. The storehouse stands in a private courtyard between two wings of a working inn. It cannot be seen from the public road, it is not open for public inspection, and its interior is in active use for storage. The window hood that makes it worth writing about faces inward.

Guests staying at the inn may be able to see the exterior when crossing the courtyard, though this is not guaranteed and depends on how the property is being used at the time. Anyone with a specific architectural interest should telephone in advance on 0596-43-2014, between 9:00 and 20:00, and explain what they hope to see. Treat any access as a courtesy rather than an entitlement, and do not photograph without permission.

For readers who came for the storehouse architecture itself, there is a better destination twenty minutes away. The Ise Kawasaki Merchant Museum in the old wholesale district of Kawasaki preserves seven storehouses and two townhouses, twelve buildings in all registered as Tangible Cultural Properties in 2001. Several are open, some house shops and exhibition rooms, and you can stand inside a dozō and look at the frame. Opening hours run from 9:30 to 17:00, closed Tuesdays, with the shop storehouses opening at 10:00. It is on the Setagawa river, a short bus or taxi ride from Ise-shi Station.

If you are in Futami anyway, the exterior of the Asanokan Entrance Wing is fully visible from the old highway at any hour with no charge, and that building gives a clear sense of the inn's period and character. The wedded rocks at Futami Okitama Shrine are five to ten minutes further on foot. JR Futaminoura Station is eight to ten minutes from the inn, which offers guests a free pickup arranged by telephone a day ahead. The Hinjitsukan closed in March 2026 for seismic strengthening and conservation, with reopening projected around 2032, so check before including it in a route.